Valve to explain 'hardware opportunities' for Linux in the living room

"Next week we're going to be rolling out more information about how we get there and what are the hardware opportunities we see for bringing Linux into the living room," Gabe Newell said.

Valve's Gabe Newell likes Linux. A lot. In spite of the operating system representing less-than-one percent share by every metric used by Valve, Newell believes that Linux will play a large role in the future of PC gaming--so much so that his company is invested in making a Linux-based Steambox. More information on the project could be available as early as next week, according to Newell. "Next week we're going to be rolling out more information about how we get there and what are the hardware opportunities we see for bringing Linux into the living room," he said.

Speaking at LinuxCon (via ArsTechnica), Newell said that bringing Steam to Linux "was a signal for our development partners that we really were serious about this Linux thing we were talking about."

In addition to releasing games on the OS, Valve is showing their support of Linux by contributing to the LLDB debugger project, because developers frequently cite the need for a debugger to make Linux a better development platform.

Newell still believes Windows 8 is a catastrophe, pointing out that PC sales have experienced year-over-year declines. However, Steam sales have increased 76 percent--suggesting Valve is doing something right.

"Systems which are innovation-friendly and embrace openness are going to have a greater competitive advantage to closed or tightly regulated systems," he noted.